Meta Data Science Manager Interview Experience — Six VO Rounds, None Matched the Forum's Question Bank

Since I looked at basically all the interview reports for the IC track, most of the time people are just going back and forth between the same cases from the past two years:

AR, 4 cases:

• Restaurant recommendation
• IG shopping
• FB group/circle
• FB vs. IG

AE, 4 cases:

• Fake accounts
• Fake news
• Comment distribution
• Ads inserted into the feed

1. I've already summarized it like this, so go search the specific questions yourselves.
2. Occasionally you'll see someone unlucky whose interviewer went off-script and asked something not on this list.

So back to the Leadership VO — here's my own experience, and my sample-size-of-1 conclusion:

The forum's interview reports don't apply to the M-track VO.

My VO had 6 rounds. Counting every case interview plus the BQ interview, basically none of the questions were exact matches from the forum's question bank. Of course there's a non-zero chance my experience is an outlier — I can't tell that from the data I have.

Round by round:

2x Case Analysis: format-wise this is the same as the forum's AR. The questions were too specific for me to post here. But I used to wonder whether AE would come up too — nobody knew. Now I know, and I'm sharing it: AE does not come up. No stats knowledge required.

Product Leadership: fully interviewer freestyle. They asked about my main work experience, then kept digging deeper — what projects I specifically worked on, who I worked with, what my contributions were, what the impact was, all kinds of details.

People Leadership: fully interviewer freestyle. Team-related questions, wide open — how you think about promotions, how you evaluate potential, which projects should be pushed back, which projects need more headcount.

Tech/SQL: I figured this one couldn't possibly be freestyle — there has to be a table and an answer, so surely it comes from the forum's question bank. Nope. Still the interviewer's own table and questions, because it wasn't copied from anywhere. The format was also very open — more than half the questions didn't require writing code, and leaned more toward case analysis based on the table.

So back to the fundamental question: how do you prepare? I was a little disappointed that none of it matched the forum's question bank, since I'd spent so much time preparing for it — if it had actually come up, I feel like it would've been in the bag. But on the other hand, going through the forum's question bank over and over until I really knew it cold still helped a lot with handling freestyle cases. So I think the right mindset is to treat the forum's interview questions as a mock exam. Just like the gaokao (China's national college entrance exam) — if it happens to match, great, you've scored; if it doesn't, well, it was still good review material.